How staffing firms can find the right candidates faster
Your next great candidate could already be in your database. The challenge is finding them quickly.
To find the right candidate, recruiters can spend a significant amount of time building and refining searches, sorting through results, and reviewing candidate profiles one by one. And even after narrowing the pool, recruiters still need to determine which candidates are the strongest fit for the role.
Search & Match helps automate that work, using AI to build searches, expand talent pools, identify strong matches, and prioritize candidates so recruiters can spend less time searching and more time moving the right candidates forward.
And firms are already seeing the impact. More than 2,500 global staffing agencies trust Bullhorn’s Search & Match technology, with firms reporting a 50% reduction in sourcing time and 30% faster ramp-up for new recruiters.
For IDR, Search & Match helped transform how the team sourced candidates. In Q1 2026, 52% of the firm’s submissions came from its Bullhorn database and Amplify Screener, up from just 7.42% one year earlier. Rather than relying primarily on external sourcing, the team built greater trust in its own database and created a system that made it easier for recruiters to use.
So, how can Search & Match help recruiters get more from the candidate database they already have?
Stop starting every search from scratch
Sourcing for a new job order shouldn’t mean starting a search manually from scratch.
Autobuild takes the details from a job description and creates a targeted search for you. It pulls in relevant job titles, skills, keywords, and other criteria, giving recruiters a search they can review and refine rather than building everything themselves.
Don’t let keywords limit your talent pool
The right candidate doesn’t always use the same words as the job description.
Keyword Expansion helps broaden your search with related terms and job titles, making it easier to find candidates whose experience may be a fit even when their profiles don’t use the exact language you’re searching for.
Recruiters can also use Natural Language Search to describe who they’re looking for in everyday language.
For example:
“Quality engineer in Boston with medical device experience.”
Instead of figuring out how to build a complex search, recruiters can describe what they need and use that as a starting point.
Know which candidates to contact first
Finding candidates is one thing. Knowing where to focus first is another.
Recommended Candidates automatically surfaces the top 10 candidates for a job, while Relevancy Scores help show which candidates are most likely to be successfully placed.
Search & Match uses more than 22 billion data points from real staffing activity, including 800 million candidates, 120+ million job postings, 450+ million submissions, and 60 million placements. That gives the technology a lot of staffing-specific context to work with when identifying successful matches.
Instead of working through every result in the same order, recruiters can start with the candidates Search & Match predicts are most likely to be the right fit.
For TOPS Staffing, making Search & Match part of the daily workflow helped recruiters get through their candidate reviews faster, shaving off hours of work. Instead of spending the morning sorting through candidates, recruiters could quickly focus on the people most likely to be the right fit for the role.
Search beyond your database
Sometimes the candidate you need is already in your database. Sometimes you need to look elsewhere.
External Source Integration lets recruiters search supported external sources alongside their Bullhorn database. That means you can expand your reach without repeating the same search across different platforms.
When your database doesn’t have the right fit, you have another place to look without leaving the workflow.
The right candidate may not be available in the moment
For hard-to-fill or ongoing roles, the right candidate may not be in your database when you first run a search.
Followed Searches let recruiters save their search criteria that continues looking for new matching candidates in the background. When new candidates match, recruiters can be alerted without having to rebuild the search.
That means a search can keep working as new candidates enter the database, rather than relying on recruiters to remember to run it again.
Get more from your data
Your data doesn’t have to be perfect to get started with Search & Match.
Tools within Bullhorn Amplify can help enrich information such as candidate summaries, job titles, skills, and employment history, giving Search & Match more useful information to work with.
That’s important because Search & Match learns from real staffing data and hiring outcomes. The more useful information available in your records, the more context it has when identifying potential matches.
“With the Search & Match tool, we’ve seen significant improvements, and we continue to enhance its capabilities by pairing it with AI enrichment. This ensures we have the structured data needed to power smarter search criteria and deliver the most relevant candidates faster than ever.”
— Wendy Kennah, COO, Procom
Getting started
Your database already holds valuable talent. The challenge is making it easier to find the right candidates.
Search & Match puts AI-powered search and matching into the recruiting workflow, helping teams make better use of the candidate database they already have while spending more time on the conversations that lead to placements. And Search & Match is just one part of the broader Amplify platform. Other Amplify capabilities can support different parts of the staffing workflow, helping teams automate more of the work while keeping recruiters focused on relationships and placements.
Ready to see what Search & Match can do for your team? Explore Amplify Search & Match.
